The path to extremism: The story of how one young man from Calgary ended up dead in Syria

The Downtown 8th & 8th Musallah is a storefront Islamic centre a few blocks from the Calgary Tower. It has an unobtrusive sign above blind-covered windows, and a door that opens to a prayer room with a small library.

Even between prayer times, Damian Clairmont would sit on the carpeted floor reading books about Islam. Sometimes he would go to the halal restaurant around the corner, Calgary Shwarma, to read and talk about his newfound faith.

Then about 18 months ago, he disappeared. He flew to Seattle and boarded a flight to Amsterdam. From there he took a plane to Istanbul and crossed the Turkish border into northern Syria to join an armed group aligned with Al-Qaeda.

An investigation by the National Post has found he was one of a small group of young men who left Calgary to fight in the Syrian conflict, which has become a magnet for Western extremists, including a few dozen Canadians.

“I think it’s a circle of friends,” said Syed Soharwardy, a Calgary imam who said he heard about the group of between three and five recruits from Canadian Security Intelligence Service officers trying to piece together what happened to Mr. Clairmont and his suspected associates.

“They told me three,” said another man active in the Calgary Muslim community who also spoke to CSIS, but did not want his name published. “They said three are missing.” One of them was seen with Mr. Clairmont at the Downtown 8th & 8th Musallah, he said. He did not know about the third man.

How did this happen?

It is an important question, not only for parents who have watched their children harden and leave to join terror groups, but also for the government, which is worried the radicalized veterans of Syria will one day turn against Canada.

Last week, the RCMP visited the 8th & 8th prayer centre, trying to identify a member of the same extremist group Mr. Clairmont had joined. The officers showed around the man’s photo but nobody recognized him.

The picture was taken from a recent propaganda video in which an English-speaking gunman explained he had come to Syria to serve Allah. “This is a message to Canada and all the American tyrants: We are coming and we will destroy you,” he said. “With permission from Allah the almighty, we will bring you slaughter.”

Before he left Calgary, Mr. Clairmont took Justin Thibeau to the 8th & 8th Islamic centre and asked him to wait outside while he prayed. They were best friends and had grown up together in southwestern Nova Scotia. Mr. Clairmont had moved to Calgary, but he would still go back to visit.

Each time he returned to the East Coast, however, he had a different persona, Mr. Thibeau said. One year he looked like a rapper in a ball cap and baggy basketball clothes. The next he was dressed like a fashion model. A Roman Catholic and Acadian, Mr. Clairmont sometimes wore a crucifix. For a while, he had considered joining the military. “It seemed like he was trying to find himself.”

Struggling with depression, Mr. Clairmont had dropped out of high school at age 14 and, at 17, had attempted suicide by drinking anti-freeze. Following his release from hospital, he lived in a group home, saw a psychiatrist, went on medication and was arrested for trying to buy ecstasy.

When Mr. Clairmont first spoke about Islam and the calming effect it had on him, Mr. Thibeau was happy for him. Now calling himself Mustafa, he said he had finally found something that brought him peace. He compared it to when they had done martial arts together as kids.

But when Mr. Thibeau moved to Calgary in 2011 and stayed at the home of Mr. Clairmont’s mother, he felt his best friend had become preachy and judgmental. He openly disapproved of Mr. Thibeau’s lifestyle, warning him, “You’re going down the wrong path.”

Mr. Clairmont tried to convert his best friend, telling him, “I can open your eyes.” Mr. Thibeau immediately set him straight. “I said, ‘It’s cool that you like it but don’t shove it down my throat.” That put it to a stop, but Mr. Clairmont kept after him in other ways.

When he found out Mr. Thibeau wanted to join the Canadian Forces, he pestered him not to do it. “He couldn’t fathom why I wanted to join the military,” Mr. Thibeau said in his first interview on the events. Every time they met, he would raise the topic, begging him not to enlist because, he argued, the Canadian military was killing Muslims like him.

“He would mention things going on in Syria,” Mr. Thibeau said. He would say, “It’s not right what’s going on there.” Mr. Clairmont never let on that he wanted to join the fight but once said, “I wish there was something I could do.”

His mother, Christianne Boudreau, noticed the change as well. The year before her son left, he became secretive and argumentative. He peddled 9/11 conspiracy theories and said the media weren’t telling the truth about what was happening to Muslims around the world. “He would get pretty worked up about it and conversations could get pretty heated,” she said.

He started working out at the gym and would go on hikes with his prayer group. But Mrs. Boudreau thought it was just his nature to immerse himself in his interests. “Certain things, he’d get really zestful about,” she said. “And then he’d get bored and move on to the next thing.”

Unemployed and living off Alberta benefits for those with severe disabilities, Mr. Clairmont began to talk about moving to a Muslim country where he could study Arabic. He mentioned Cairo, said Said Awar, who works at Calgary Shwarma.

“Most people in the masjid [mosque] know him,” said Mr. Awar, who recalled seeing Mr. Clairmont at the 8th& 8th prayer centre and an affiliated mosque. He also saw him in the restaurant reading books about topics such as Tawhid, the concept at the root of Islam that maintains that Allah is the one and only God.

Usually Mr. Clairmont was alone, he said, and he did not seem under the influence of any particular mentor. Mr. Clairmont never spoke about Syria and Mr. Awar said he didn’t know how the Canadian ended up fighting there. “It’s very hard to say.”

The RCMP has been investigating the role played by “facilitators” who they suspect are helping send recruits to Syria. “I would say that there are ongoing investigations with respect to individuals that are involved in facilitating,” Assistant Commissioner James Malizia, who heads the RCMP’s counterterrorism program, said in an interview.

He would not comment on the Calgary investigation but said while some extremists had been radicalized over the Internet and found their own way to Syria, facilitators also helped potential recruits connect with armed opposition groups. According to Assistant Commissioner Malizia, they “facilitate movement and in some cases provide funding.”

A Calgary Muslim leader said CSIS officers investigating Mr. Clairmont had asked him about Badi Hammadieh, a member of a Syrian-Canadian family that has lived in Calgary for decades. Mr. Hammadieh was seen with Mr. Clairmont at the Downtown 8th & 8th Islamic centre, he said.

“I’ve seen the guy and I’ve seen him hanging around with Damian,” said the man, who asked not to be named. “People know him,” he added. But he wasn’t sure about the man’s relationship with Mr. Clairmont. “I was asked about him and that’s the information I gave.”

Mrs. Boudreau also said CSIS officers told her they were looking into a possible “ringleader.” They showed her a photo but she did not recognize the man. CSIS told her the man’s family ran a Calgary vacuum store. Mr. Hammadieh’s father is listed as the proprietor of a vacuum store in the city.

A man working at the vacuum shop declined to speak to a reporter, saying all journalists were biased against Muslims. Confronted with the allegations at the front door of his father’s house, Mr. Hammadieh denied having anything to do with sending Mr. Clairmont to Syria.

“That’s not the way it is,” said the young man, who said he could not answer questions because he was late for work. “I already talked to CSIS about this,” he said, adding the investigators had seemed satisfied by what he told them. He said he only knew Mr. Clairmont through someone else. “He was self-driven. If anyone was pushing him, he was pushing himself.”

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When her son told her he would be travelling to Egypt to study Arabic, Mrs. Boudreau never thought he’d actually go through with it. He was always a big talker. The night before he was supposed to leave, in November 2012, the family went out for dinner and he came back to her townhouse and played video games with his little brother. He seemed relaxed and happy-go-lucky. Only when he called from the plane in the morning did she realize he was actually going to do it.

He phoned home a month later but Mrs. Boudreau had no reason to doubt he was in Cairo until late January, when two CSIS officers came to her door. They told her they’d been watching her son as part of a two-year investigation into an extremist group they referred to as “the brotherhood.”

The intelligence officers came to her office a few days later and said they had confirmed that her son was not in Cairo. He had flown to Istanbul. They believed he had then crossed into Syria.

“I had no idea,” Mrs. Boudreau said.

The CSIS officers took away her son’s computer and phones for analysis, but Mrs. Boudreau said he had scrubbed them clean. Aside from that, all he left behind were a wallet (empty except for his psychiatrist’s business card) and some notebooks in which he had practised his Arabic.

Whenever he called home or, more frequently, messaged his mother on Facebook, he said he was helping women and children. He also began to speak with a National Post reporter — first on the phone and then by text and Facebook messages.

He would never let on exactly where he was but one of his phone numbers was Turkish, suggesting he was near the border. Neither would he say what he was doing. However, another Canadian who goes by the nom de guerre Abu Turab, said Mr. Clairmont initially joined the Al Nusrah Front, an affiliate of Al-Qaeda.

When it split into factions in mid-2013, he said Mr. Clairmont went with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), an ultra-extreme jihadist group that has been widely condemned for committing atrocities and forcibly imposing its militant version of Islamic law on Syrians.

Now going by Abu Talha Al Kanadi (“The Canadian”), Mr. Clairmont spent a “long time” doing guard duty in Aleppo, Abu Turab wrote in a recent online post. Eventually he was “given a position of responsibility” in Jarabulus, a city on the Turkish border controlled by ISIS.

Mrs. Boudreau didn’t know what to do. She offered to fly to Turkey to bring her son home, but he didn’t want to leave. He said he was working toward the afterlife. The most she got was a promise that someone would call if anything happened. The phone never left her side after that.

To his mother, he seemed cold. It wasn’t her Damian anymore. She reached out to imams for help but Mr. Clairmont told her not to listen to the “people with Muslim (or Arab) names” who were helping her. He declared them “in so many ways far from Islam.” A few short years after converting, and still a novice to the faith, he felt he was the better Muslim.

He also told his mother to stop repeating that she missed him and that he was breaking her heart. He said he didn’t feel any guilt and “nothing has changed.” He made it clear he was staying. “It would be better for you to accept this,” he wrote. He said he missed her but he wasn’t coming home.

“I am finally where I belong,” he wrote.

He stopped communicating with her last August, but he continued to justify himself in correspondence with the Post. “Sure, Canada — like this life — is a place where you can allow yourself to believe you have figured things out,” he wrote. “Among the simplest ways to do so is to forget that anyone or anything exists beyond it, or that you have any responsibility to anyone or anything other than it.”

He was angered by the suggestion that those who leave Canada to fight for foreign causes were being cynically exploited by extremists looking for cannon fodder. He called that condescending. “I am where I am because I believe in something,” he countered.

Through the prism of his growing extremism, his view of Canada became cartoonish. “The benefit for myself in terms of the worldly life is most certainly back in Canada where I could see my family, indulge in fornication and infidelity legally and limitlessly and stagger around poisoned on intoxicants and then lie to myself and the world about ‘freedom’ and how fantastic it is.

“After all, that is what we were conditioned to believe since our school days, was it not? … Challenging those learned assumptions, questioning them and actually being willing to change yourself is always much harder to do. My doing so caused a search for truth and ended in a conclusion that Islam was the answer.

“With that came Islam’s concept of working for an afterlife that never ends, and not trading success in that life for the things assumed — by my prior conditioning — to be successes in this life,” he wrote. “An eternity in Paradise cannot be traded for 70 years (if that) of this place.”

With that came Islam’s concept of working for an afterlife that never ends, and not trading success in that life for the things assumed

In December, he wrote that he was “still waiting” to become a martyr and joked about the approaching Canadian winter. “I have not forgotten the cold, although it certainly is not the same here. The ski masks here usually aren’t for the cold.”

The mounting attacks between rival opposition factions were “minor,” he wrote, and were caused by those who “kill, rape, steal, use/sell drugs, and often even collaborate with the regime.” By contrast, he depicted the Al-Qaeda fighters as Syria’s saviours.

“They are clearly dominant everywhere you go, but they do not steal or rape or sell drugs or murder or kidnap for ransom and so on,” he wrote. “They are also the most effective fighting forces here and are in many cases single-handedly holding off the regime and their friends in many places while many others sit in their bases getting fat off crime and foreign money/aid.”

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He had been gone just over a year when news of his death appeared on Twitter on Jan. 14, a time of intense infighting between rival jihadist factions. Mrs. Boudreau contacted Abu Turab, the Canadian who had posted the sparse eulogy. “Yes it is true,” he responded. “I have not seen his body, but it has been confirmed by a few sources.”

He said her son had been killed while defending his base in Aleppo. “He told me that was his main motivation, to help the Syrian people,” Abu Turab wrote, adding “he was not a threat to Canada … Nor did he want to kill people everywhere.”

He was 22.

But if he had intended to help Syrians suffering under President Bashar Al-Assad, he ended up in a terrorist group composed of foreigners bent on forcing their hardline ideology on Syrians. And he was ultimately killed because of it, gunned down not by pro-government troops but by a competing anti-Assad faction.

“In his heart, he was there to help women and children. That would be Damian, he always believed in helping others,” his mother insisted.

Three months had passed since his death and still she looked perplexed as she sat at the computer in her townhouse basement, scrolling through his final messages to her.

He said he was doing “important life-changing work.” His faith was “stronger than ever.” He was “fitter than ever,” and his Arabic was better than his French. He was looking for a wife. He was harsh with her but his final Facebook message was mostly a letter home from a son desperate for his mother’s approval.

“He was a loving kid,” his mother said, apologizing for her tears as she clicked through the digital photos on her computer that showed her son cradling his newborn siblings, goofing with them at Christmas and playing flag football at McMahon Stadium.

“He was smart and then he went through some bumpy periods, but he loved his siblings, loved me,” she said. “He was happy. I mean, yeah, we had our ups and downs like everybody else. But people need to realize he was a normal, everyday kid.”

Mrs. Clairmont has so many questions, and so little help. She doesn’t think the government is taking the problem seriously. She has been writing letters to politicians and started an online petition calling on Prime Minister Stephen Harper to stop the “recruitment of our children” for the Syrian war. “I don’t want to see any more families go through this, or any other young men get killed for nothing.”

Imam Soharwardy agrees with her. “The Canadian government is not dong enough to stop this brainwashing,” said the imam, founder of the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada and an outspoken critic of extremism. “It’s going on right under their nose.”

He blamed those preaching an intolerant form of the religion. “They’re not going to say go and bomb this place, but the way they preach develops a mindset that is very hateful to non-Muslims and Muslims who do not agree with them.”

There is no indication any Calgary mosques or imams are implicated in the recruitment, and extremists tend to keep their activities away from established Islamic centres, not wanting to draw attention to themselves.

The director of religious programming at the Islamic Information Society of Calgary, the federally regulated charity that runs the 8th & 8th prayer centre, did not hesitate to oppose what Mr. Clairmont and his friends had done.

“We don’t advise people to go,” said Sheikh Hacene Chebbani, who would sometimes see Mr. Clairmont in the audience at his Friday sermons. “We don’t support this and I don’t think they are helping the Syrian people. The people who are coming from outside with their own ideology, their own agendas — I don’t think they are helping.”

Those who sympathize with Syrians were better off sending money and medicine, said the imam, who blamed the Internet for playing a major role in radicalizing youths. “We don’t believe there is a bigger brother who is recruiting.”

The RCMP recently told Mrs. Boudreau they were preparing to interview one of Mr. Clairmont’s friends outside the country. His parents had convinced him not to go to Syria and were keeping a tight rein on him. “I wish I would have had the opportunity to do the same with Damian,” she said. “But it’s a little too late for our family.”